


Casualties of War

by bonibaru



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-26
Updated: 2017-03-26
Packaged: 2018-10-10 18:46:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,084
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10444782
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bonibaru/pseuds/bonibaru
Summary: Veela Challenge FicTitle: Casualties of WarRequested Pairing: Hermione/SnapeRating: RChallenge Quote:I know not if I know what true love is,But if I know, then, if I love not him,I know there is none other I can love.  -Tennyson





	

_His mood was often like a fiend, and rose_  
_And drove him into wastes and solitudes_  
_For agony, who was yet a living soul._  
_Marred as he was, he seemed the goodliest man_  
_That ever among ladies ate in hall,_  
_And noblest, when she lifted up her eyes._  
_However marred, of more than twice her years,_  
_Seamed with an ancient swordcut on the cheek,_  
_And bruised and bronzed, she lifted up her eyes_  
_And loved him, with that love which was her doom._

*****

Then

Two days had passed. He hadn’t come back.

Forty-eight more hours of uncertainty crawled by as she waited for word from the searchers, anxious to find out where he was being held. They knew he wasn’t dead but had no way to know how much longer that would be the case. Torturing a man to death could take weeks or days, the presence or absence of life hinging on the whims of a madman. 

Her skin itched, her nerves jangled. They had to get him out. They never told him any of the Order’s plans – it would have been too much of a risk. It would have taken no time at all for Voldemort to squeeze the information out like juice from an overripe plum. Spies couldn’t betray what they didn’t know, and that kept the rest alive. He wasn’t being held as bait because his captors probably didn’t think anyone would be foolish enough to try to come for him. So that meant that the Death Eaters would be using him for play, not to get information, and that infuriated and terrified her.

Hermione paced the floor of the Headmaster’s office and waited, and waited, and waited. Dumbledore’s eyes were bright in his pinched face but he only said things like _war means sacrifice_ and _the good of the many_ and a dozen other cliches which she knew simply meant he wasn’t going to form a rescue party.

That was exactly why they had to go themselves, she had said to Harry, and he’d agreed, his jaw set in grim determination. Someone on their team was in trouble. They would go and save Severus.

Just like they always did.

***  
Draco laid out blueprints and maps, spoke of wards and booby traps and secret passages. Hermione’s mind whirled as she listened. Ron and Harry nodded and asked questions.

“You can do it,” Draco said finally, after having outlined all the ways that it was impossible for them to do it, “but I have to go with you. The security wards won’t go off if a Malfoy is present and I know the way in real life better than I can show you with these.”

“Are you sure?” Harry asked, laying his hand on Draco’s arm. “If we’re caught – if they find you with _us_ –“

“Then we all die,” Draco said. “He was my head of House, Potter, he’s my – “ and he couldn’t finish, but he laid his hand over Harry’s and didn’t have to, because they all knew how the sentence ended. Harry nodded slowly; Hermione knew he understood, because Harry lived with Remus now who cried himself to sleep all but 3 nights a month and howled his way through those. Pain was a universal language.

***

She could hear Harry and Ron breathing in the darkness behind her as they passed into the dungeons of Malfoy Manor, soft shallow rushes of air that reminded her she wasn’t alone. She couldn’t hear anything from Draco, moving ahead of her stealthy and silent as a serpent over stone, but she followed the pale gleam of his hair as it caught the occasional glimmer of torchlight. 

The dungeons were warded, Draco told them, and although his Malfoy presence in their midst negated the intruder alarms they still weren’t going to be able to use magic to break Snape out. Cleverness and brute force would have to do the trick. The alarms would trigger as soon as they used magic to transport themselves away, but by then it should be too late to stop them.

There was one guard at the doorway. Draco motioned for them to stay hidden and sauntered coolly toward him. In less than a minute the man’s body sprawled across the threshold. Draco barely had time to turn the key in the lock before she pushed by him and ran to the dark figure slumped in the corner.

He was unconscious but breathing. His face was a mass of lumps and bruises, there was dried blood on the side of his neck. They’d broken all the fingers on both of his hands. 

“Help me get him up,” Harry said, and Draco grabbed one arm while Harry lifted the other around his neck. Snape’s eyelashes fluttered and he moaned softly. 

“I’m sorry, Professor,” Harry said. “But we’ve got to move you to get you out.”

Ron darted into the room, panic in his eyes.

“Someone’s coming!”

“Go _now_ ,” Draco hissed, and she’d opened her mouth to speak the words of the transporting spell, when the world erupted in a blaze of burning green and a heavy blow struck her from behind.

She didn’t know anything else for a long, long time.

***

_Full simple was her answer, 'What know I?_  
_My brethren have been all my fellowship;_  
_And I, when often they have talked of love,_  
_Wished it had been my mother, for they talked,_  
_Meseemed, of what they knew not; so myself--_  
_I know not if I know what true love is,_  
_But if I know, then, if I love not him,_  
_I know there is none other I can love.'_  
_'Yea, by God's death,' said he, 'ye love him well,_  
_But would not, knew ye what all others know,_  
_And whom he loves.' 'So be it,' cried Elaine,_  
_And lifted her fair face and moved away._

***

Now

His logical mind accepts that an older man’s attraction to a younger woman is a biological imperative: survival of the species, and so on. His heart – and he does have one, no matter what the children whisper about him behind their quills – doesn’t make the transition so easily. He’s finally managed to convince himself that his feelings for her stem from something other than transposed pity. It has taken him longer than that to accept that her feelings for him in return are genuine, and not some misdirected byproduct of his previously weakened state and her overly nurturing nature. He wouldn’t have been able to bear it if either of those theories had turned out to be true.

Sometimes he doesn’t mind being proven wrong.

Things being as they are, he doesn’t enjoy falling in love with her. To love another person is a disturbing process even in the best of times. If their lives had been different, it might have been a pleasant distraction, perhaps even something more. But he can’t stop what’s happening to her, and he hates the feeling of helplessness that it brings. When she curls into him, he touches her with all the gentleness he can muster, and ignores the cramps in his hands.

His pale fingers, misshapen and awkward, look darker against her whitening skin. His mother had always said he had the hands of an artist. That was before Lucius Malfoy used them for target practice.

Damp and cold make them ache, and it’s always like that in the dungeons. He wears gloves now to stir the potions. She heats rocks near the fire and wraps his fingers around them when he lacks the dexterity needed to measure ingredients properly. He sits on the floor with hot rocks in his hands and remembers an endless cycle of torture and forced healing, torture and forced healing, until the children – and they were still children to him, though they’d long since gone from Hogwarts, while the war grew around them in scope and ferocity – came to get him out.

He still can’t fathom why they’d done it. He wouldn’t have done it for any of them. Not even her.

He doesn’t close his eyes, because when he does all he can see is red hair and red blood and one too many bodies lying far too still on the ground. He turns away from the memory of her crying in Potter’s arms for days after waking up, weakened as she was by fighting, grief, and a curse hurled in hatred that she’d half absorbed before Weasley had knocked her sideways and taken the full brunt of the rest, head on.

Not enough to kill her instantly, but killing her slowly now just the same.

They’ve tried everything they can think of: potions, counter-spells, magical artifacts with forgotten powers. Every book in the library has been thoroughly examined; Draco has covered every secret text hidden in dusty corners of Malfoy Manor. There is no record of any wizard (save one) ever surviving _Aveda Kedavra_. No one can tell her how many days she has left, or how the end will come.

He’s taken all the clocks out of their rooms. The sound of the ticking drives him nearly mad.

She does her best to hide it, but his eyes see everything she doesn’t want the others to recognize. When she leans against her desk for a few seconds longer than the day before. How she eats three less bites of peas at dinner than last week. How her breathing quickens ever so slightly more now when she ascends the stair from his rooms.

At night they spoon together for warmth, her back against his belly. Her hair smells like lavender soap, but underneath that he can detect the faintest hint of antiseptic and the Muggle medicines she takes when the pain becomes more than even his potions can handle.

When they make love, she traces the pattern of scars on his body, mapping out his history under her delicate fingertips. There are hardly any unmarked places left for her to kiss, but every time she finds one she lingers there, where the sensation is strongest, sending tingles along his skin with every dip and stroke of her tongue. He flinched the first time she touched the long white line across his right side, just under the ribcage, from the last big battle when Lucius Malfoy’s knife had nearly finished what his spells and curses and weeks of torture had started.

Now Lucius is interred in the Malfoy family crypt and Draco has been exonerated of all wrongdoing by the Ministry. _Casualties of war are to be expected. Heroism in the line of fire._ As if words can erase – but no matter. Now Weasley has a posthumous award on the Wall of Honor and Draco and Potter are holed up together in a flat in London. 

Potter comes to see her every few weeks, but always comes alone.

He rolls her gently onto her back and begins his own exploration. The supportive care potions he makes her drink every morning give her a faint smoky taste, like the embers of a dying fire. Her small hand rests gently on his head, a benediction, a blessing. She makes soft sounds, low in her throat, fragile-sounding whimpers and little sighs that he thinks would bring him to the verge of tears if there were any left in his body. He kisses her as deeply as he dares, nuzzling and tasting and wishing he could breathe life back into her this way. At least when she shudders under his tongue and clamps around his fingers, he knows that she will sleep more restfully tonight, a little of the tension eased away for now. 

He rests his head on her belly, listens as her heartbeat gradually slows to normal. She is languid under him, threading her fingers through his hair and making tentative murmuring sounds that he thinks must be love, after all.

He often dreams of her dying; on this night she grows great white wings and jumps off the top of the Astronomy Tower. Her hair flutters out behind her as the air catches underneath and she spirals back upward, soars into the clouds. He remains below, feet firmly planted on the ground, and watches her fly out of reach. He tosses his arms, moans and it wakes her; she draws him into her arms as she would a restless child.

“Hermione -“ he whispers, but his throat always tightens, and he can’t get the next words out.

“I know,” she whispers back, placing her fingers on his lips. “I know, Severus.”


End file.
